by Ed Gorman
I leaned up, fighting my bonds, to see who was on the wagon seat. Aikins and Webley. Aikins driving.
We were heading north, into the territory where the last serious gold strikes had gone bust about ten years earlier. All that was left was an enormous boot hill and a ghost town filled with empty buildings that criminals hid out in sometimes. The only other residents were rats and stray dogs and the occasional coyote.
A good place to keep a prisoner, a ghost town. Leave a couple of guards with her, nobody would bother her. Keep her bound and gagged the way I was, she wouldn’t even have a chance of screaming for help.
Poor Callie. I knew about where she was now. And I could also figure out what they wanted her to do. And as soon as she did it- Well, there were two of us to kill now. Ordinarily, Webley probably wouldn’t have had the will for something like this. But as he’d said, when your wife’s life was at stake-
The buckboard jounced and bounced and bumped and thumped. Aikins and Webley talked every once in a while, but in voices so low it was as if they were afraid they might awaken me or something.
We were heading into a draw, the mountain slopes steep and ragged on either side. Streamlike music played its cool clear song. Usually such natural sights would have pleased me. But all I could think about was Callie. I didn’t necessarily believe Webley’s word that she was still alive.
I began to recognize the place as soon as the buckboard reached the rutted main street. The ghost town of Harbor. It had had two booms-one sparked by placer gold and another, following the tapping out of that placer gold, in quartz mining. The problem being that quartz mining was wasteful and expensive. So that boom, too, tapped out. It always amazed me how quickly boomtowns became ghost towns. Harbor went from a prostitute-filled, three-hotel gambling den of nearly eight thousand to what it was now-a graveyard of deserted and dying false fronts and the remnants of the quartz work.
As we passed down the street, I gazed up at the dark dead eyes of the hotel rooms. Lively parties had been held in all of them, no doubt. Now they looked out upon decay and destruction.
The buckboard clattered to a stop.
Aikins jumped down, came around, and dragged me out of the wagon bed. I could take mincing little steps, my ankles bound the way they were. He poked the barrel of a shotgun into my back and pushed me up the steps of a two-story building fronted by a fading sign that said REGAL HOTEL. There was nothing regal about it, at least not these days.
Inside, Aikins grabbed a lantern, got it going. Rich yellow light repelled shadow and let me see what a hotel looked like after dogs, cats, rats, coyotes, and maybe even a puma or two had had their way with it for many long years. The floor was covered with fecal droppings of many kinds. The little furniture that was left was similarly covered. The cushion backing of a once-fancy love seat had been clawed, stuffing like innards spilling out. The place was pretty damned chilly. It smelled of rotting wood and basement mildew.
Webley came in then. He nodded to Aikins, and Aikins pushed me toward the stairs. Going up them seemed to take forever. My bound wrists clung to the banister for purchase.
Aikins pushed me down the second-floor hall, stepped ahead of me, kicked a door open, and there we were. A chunky Mexican with a sawed-off shotgun sat in a chair, guarding her.
She didn’t even wake up when Aikins stomped the door in. In the lantern light, I could see what they’d done to her. The broken nose. The black eyes. The busted lip.
As if sensing what I was feeling, Webley said, “We only did what was necessary.” He sounded apologetic. But no apology in the world could explain or forgive what I was seeing. Only the frail rise and fall of her chest told me that she was able to draw breath.
There was nothing I could do about it now. But later. Later, Webley would be the one lucky to draw breath.
Callie slept with three quilts over her. She wore a man’s flannel shirt and at the top of it I could see a line of long underwear. The days would be hot in here, no doubt. But nights would be cold.
“I gave her something to help her sleep,” Webley said as Aikins helped sit me down in a comer. “She’ll be fine. For now. But if you love her, Marshal, you’d better convince her to do what I say. I want her to write a letter confessing she killed Stanton. She can say it was in self-defense. She can say that he fell on the knife when they were wrestling over it. I really don’t care how she does it. As long as she does it.”
He nodded to Aikins. That silent language again. The nod must have been eloquent and articulate in a way an outsider couldn’t understand.
Aikins came over and relieved me of my gag.
“Help me, Marshal. Save your wife any more pain.”
“You know I’m going to kill you, don’t you?”
“I’m sure you’d like to. And I’m sure you’d try-under normal circumstances. But these aren’t normal, Marshal. For one thing, you’re tied up. For another, you’d have to deal with Aikins here. And as tough as you are, you aren’t anywhere near as tough as he is. Or as young.”
Aikins listened to all this without showing any expression on his broad, flat, prairie face.
“She should wake up in another couple of hours,” Webley said. “Then I want you to talk to her. Tell her to do the sensible thing.”
“And when she signs, then you kill us.”
“Maybe not. I’ll have the letter I need.”
“And I’ll have a bruised wife I can show to people. I’ll tell them all about the conditions she wrote the letter under. And I’ll mention who beat her into writing the letter.”
“But you’ll have to prove it, Marshal. A court of law locally-I think most folks would take my word over yours. I don’t mean to pull rank, but I think I have a little more authority than you do in this area.”
“You going to tell me about your great grandpappy now?”
That one angered him. “Never talk about my father in that tone. You understand, Marshal?”
I shrugged. “So, meanwhile, your wife goes free. What happens when she kills somebody next time?”
“There won’t be any next time. I’m going to keep a very tight hold on her. Very tight.”
“She’ll get a chance. Unless you chain her in a basement somewhere.”
“That’s for me to worry about, Marshal. Right now, the only thing you should worry about is your wife here. We’re going to hang on here until she wakes up and until you convince her to write that letter.” Another nod to Aikins. “We’re going to go fix some coffee. There’s a working stove out there, believe it or not.”
Aikins disappeared into the gloom beyond the door.
“I really don’t want her to be beaten again, Marshal,” Webley said from the doorway. “I don’t much have the stomach for this sort of thing.”
“I’m going to kill you, Webley.”
He smiled briefly and then looked troubled. “Yes, I think you mentioned that once. And you know what? I don’t blame you at all. I’d do the same thing if I were you actually I really would.” The hell of it was, I believed him. Webley took the lantern. I sat in the room with my wife.
She snored softly, turned on her side. A night bird’s cry. Wind under the eaves. My straining against my bonds.
***
After a time, Webley and Aikins and the Mexican guard started talking. I couldn’t make out the words. They’d be back soon enough. Maybe an hour. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see Callie beaten. And me unable to do anything about it.
The night bird again and again and again. He was as agitated as I was. He sounded angry and scared. As I was.
I was in a race. I had to get out of my bonds before they came back. There was no way I could let them beat Callie. I didn’t even think about them killing us. Beating her would be enough.
It took me ten minutes to see that Webley and his men had forgotten the same thing I had: my spurs. If I could stretch-
I did stretch. My arms felt as if they were being ripped from their sockets as I tried over and ove
r to touch my wrists to my spurs, which were reasonably sharp. Sharp enough to start rope unraveling anyway.
I was just starting to get somewhere-feeling the rowels bite into the rope-when Webley came in. He didn’t say anything to me. He just walked over to the bed and there in the shadows pinched Callie on the cheek. He wanted to see if she was faking sleep. She didn’t wake up, didn’t even groan.
He walked back out. I could see just enough of his face to see that he was unhappy.
I went back to work, angling the metal teeth of my spurs into the rope, starting to tear its fiber.
Another five minutes and Webley was back. “I thought I heard voices.”
“Not unless I was talking to myself.” I’d managed to pull myself upright again, so that he’d have no hint that I was stretching to reach my spur.
He came over to me, looked me up and down. He was smart enough to assume that I’d try to escape, but not smart enough to figure out the way I’d do it. He walked out silently again.
I worked harder, faster this time. The rope came apart in tangled sections. Even where thin strands were all that held it together, pulling it apart was difficult. Strong rope. Stronger than this particular lawman anyway.
And then it snapped.
My back was to the doorway. I enjoyed idiotic glee for a full minute-my hands apart, rope dangling from each wrist-before I heard the trigger being pulled back on a six-shooter.
“You put on quite a show,” Aikins said. “Webley figured out what you were doin’ the first time he came in here. We bet a couple of dollars you couldn’t do it in under twenty minutes. I bet on you.”
“You’re good at that,” Webley said, walking down the short hall to this room. “I didn’t think you could do it at all, let alone under twenty minutes. Here’s your money, Aikins.”
Just then, Callie stirred. I had a sense she was going to sit up in bed, all wide awake and glad to see me. But soon enough, her breathing returned to its dull, flat repetition and she didn’t move at all.
"Tie him up, Aikins.”
Aikins tied me up. And soon after that, they left the room. The night bird again. My friend. The only creature in the world who understood how I felt at this moment. The frustration. The rage. The shame at being so helpless. The way Aikins had doubled his knots and wound the rope twice attuned, I wouldn’t be doing any circus tricks this time. Oh, no, not this time.
***
She was ghost-white and frail in the moonbeam that splintered on a piece of timber stretching across a hole in the roof. And when she started to raise her head, I had a terrible vision of her stirring in her coffin, what she’d look like in such a circumstance. A good number of people were being buried alive these days, a problem even the government was lately addressing with federal regulations for burials.
She said nothing at first, her torso following her neck and head so that she sat straight up now. Her eyes revealed nothing, though I had the sense that she thought she was in some kind of dream. After what she’d been through, all of this was probably unreal. She would have looked more ethereal if she’d been dressed in a flowing white nightgown. But her clothes were coarse and homely, the flannel shirt and a couple of layers of underwear. Sleep drugs often gave people chills.
She didn’t seem to see me. She sat there rigid, looking around, but somehow her eyes never finding mine. She was still probably wondering if she was in a trance of some kind.
And then, abruptly, as if I’d said something, she turned her head and saw me. She said, “Oh, my God, Lane, is that really you?”
Since the gag was back in my mouth-and I’d been a bad boy and Webley wanted to punish me so that I’d remember what happened to bad boys-all I could do was mutter against the gag.
Recognition came to her then. Her eyes narrowed. Her face seem to draw tight with purpose. She slipped out of bed.
It was obvious that she not only knew who I was, but knew what the situation was. She knew enough not to talk or make any noise.
She hitched up the denims she wore with her belt and then crossed over to me, taking long enough to kiss me tenderly on the cheek before she set to work on the ropes on my wrists. She used her fingernails and her teeth. Aikins had done a damned good job.
She stopped once-fear showing on her sweet face- when she heard somebody starting to walk back here. Then they paused and retreated.
She worked all the faster. First the wrist bonds. Then, working with me, the ankle bonds.
The footsteps again. I pointed to the bed. She nodded and hurried to it, resumed the position she’d been in when Webley was here last time.
After taking my left boot off, I waited flat against the wall on the west side of the door.
The footsteps coming closer.
I don’t believe I’ve ever hit a man with such fury. I wasn’t even sure who it was at first. I just let the person get two steps across the threshold and then I put all my anger into the punch into the back of his skull.
The Mexican was unconscious immediately. To make sure he stayed that way, I pounded him with the heel of my boot, the rowels of the spur opening up a bloody trench across the neck just above the rear collar of his shirt.
I got his Colt and I got his sawed-off. We were pretty well set.
“Hey, Juarez, you all right back there?” Aikins shouted.
Frozen silence.
“Juarez? You hear me?”
“You better go back and check on him,” Webley said.
“Damned Mex,” Aikins said. “I told you not to hire him.”
“His father worked for my father. He comes from a very nice family.” That was the thing about Webley. He was the original good-bad man.
Callie started to get out of bed. I waved her back. I didn’t want her near the line of fire.
Aikins started walking back to us. In the silence I could hear him cock his gun. Violence came easily to a man like Aikins. He wasn’t a mad dog. He was simply a professional.
He paused just before Callie’s room. I could imagine the calculations he was making at this moment. Moonlit room. Callie in bed, apparently still sleeping. And me-That was what shook him. I was nowhere to be seen.
“Better bring your shotgun with you, Mr. Webley,” he called out. “The marshal’s playing games with us.”
I had maybe a minute before Webley would be standing next to Aikins. I knew what I had to do. Would I be fast enough?
I took three steps out into the frame of the door and said, “Drop your gun, Aikins.”
He fired twice and so did I. I had the advantage in that I’d been in the dark a lot longer than he’d been. My eyes had adjusted to it. He had to contend with his vision and with me throwing myself back out of the door frame after squeezing off my two shots. I’d hit him twice somewhere between the belt line and the throat. I had no clearer idea than that. He made a lot of noise hitting the floor.
And then he was crying the way men do when they know they’re dying. We don’t know how to cry very well under the best of circumstances, and with death it’s the same. He seemed embarrassed to be crying, choking it off every quarter minute or so. It took a minute for my eyes to find the exact spots where he’d been hit. Just to the right of his heart. Just under the thyroid.
“I wish I could see my mama,” he said.
I know how that sounds. A gunny saying something like that. But we won’t be any different than that, you or me. Heroic dying’s for the dime novelists. When real people die real deaths, we tend to sound like five-year-olds and our minds are filled with images of yesterdays when we were little and our moms and dads were there to protect us.
But there was no protecting Aikins. Not now. He went into some kind of jig there on the floor, kicking out so hard that his spurs ripped the wooden floor. He was muttering names and places I’d never heard of before. It was sad, and I took no pleasure in watching it. He’d no doubt taken a turn at beating Callie. But there’s one thing about revenge- most of us don’t like to see ourselves as madmen. And that�
��s what revenge usually turns us into. A lot of times we become worse than the man we’re trying to repay in kind.
Then he was back on this plane of existence: “Shoot me, Marshal. I’m a dead man anyway. I can’t take this pain.”
“You sure?”
Blood seeped thick and dark from the corner of his mouth. “I’m sure.”
“You want to say a prayer or something?”
“You know a prayer you could say for me? I’d appreciate it.”
“It’s a Catholic prayer.”
He startled me by smiling. “Right now I don’t reckon I care what kind of prayer it is. I never had much truck with you fish-eaters. But I guess this’ll have to do me, won’t it?”
I said a prayer from the funeral mass, asking the Lord to take Aikins to his side.
He didn’t make it through the prayer. Not quite. Life left him. He became a statue that had been defaced with blood. His bowels had run down his legs and the smell was pretty bad.
Webley, near the front of the place, made a noise. Then stopped. Behind me, Callie started to get out of bed. I waved her off again.
I said, “Webley, I said I’d kill you. But I’ll tell you what.
You come back here and lay down your guns, I’ll take you back to town.”
“And then you’ll get Laura arrested.”
“She killed Stanton.”
“She’s my wife-and she’s not right in the head. It’s not her fault.”
“That’ll be for somebody else to decide. I killed Aikins and I’ll kill you if I need to.”
“I won’t let her be put in prison.”
“It’s up to you, Webley. Put down your guns or I’ll kill you. And I think you know me well enough to know that that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“He’ll do it, Webley,” said Callie. “I don’t want to see you die. Please just give Morgan your guns.”
“After all he did to you, you don’t want to see him die?” I said quietly.
Callie shook her head. “You don’t know how much he loves her, Morgan. He’s crazy with it.”